Abstract
Launched for the purpose of eradicating heresy in Bosnia and its environs, the Bosnian crusade of 1234–1241 was led by Coloman, Prince of Hungary and Duke of Slavonia (1208–1241). The precise events of the crusade are difficult to trace. However, following discussion of the logistics of the crusade and the position of the Latin Church in papal letters reveals a concerted effort made by the papacy, in part via crusade, to eradicate heretical depravity in Bosnia and instil a distinctly Latin ecclesiastical infrastructure. A combination of the uncertain position held by thirteenth-century Bosnians in relation to Latin and Greek governmental powers, the Bogomil myth, Bosnia’s mountainous terrain, and the political events of nineteenth- and twentieth-century South-Eastern Europe has led to the treatment of the crusade in historiography as an inevitable event—a movement launched against an odd people with an idiosyncratic church—and the presence of an organised heretical movement in Bosnia as a historical given. After providing an overview of the historiography from the nineteenth century to the present, tracing in particular the legacies of national and confessional historiographies, the chapter assesses the letters of Pope Gregory IX (1227–1241) concerning the crusade within the context of local and wider papal policies towards regions and peoples who did not quite fall under the direct governance of the Latin Church. The papacy employed tropes of environmental determinism in which Bosnia became a rotting wasteland ripe for the spread of heresy, alongside developing a narrative that the bloodlines of Bosnia’s rulers and prelates were adulterated with heresy. In order to protect Christendom, this necessitated the invasive alteration of the imaginative and physical landscapes of Bosnia, and the correction and submission of its peoples. The chapter argues that the crusade is most fruitfully interpreted as part of a wider papal programme to disinfect Christendom of heretical pestilence and to radically reimagine the land to reflect Christ’s glory.
No troubadour has sung, no historian has recorded, the barbarities and atrocities of this war of extermination, we only know that many thousands were enrolled among the glorious army of martyrs, and that from under the altar, the souls of them that were slain for the word of God and the testimony which they held, uttered again their cries for vengeance, on the cruel persecutor of the saints.
—Linus Pierpont Brockett, The Bogomils of Bulgaria and Bosnia; or, The Early Protestants of the East; an Attempt to Restore Some Lost Leaves of Protestant History (Philadelphia, 1879), 75.
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Notes
- 1.
Brockett, The Bogomils, 99.
- 2.
See the chapter by Rebecca Rist in this volume.
- 3.
Mark Gregory Pegg, A Most Holy War: The Albigensian Crusade and the Battle for Christendom (Oxford, 2009), 188.
- 4.
On disease and heresy, see Robert I. Moore, “Heresy as Disease,” in The Concept of Heresy in the Middle Ages (11th–13th c.). Proceedings of the International Conference Louvain May 13–16, 1973, ed. Willelm Lourdaux and Daniel Verhelst (Leuven, 1983), 1–11.
- 5.
On disease metaphors and their relationship with the idea that heretics had institutional structures, see Mark Gregory Pegg, The Corruption of Angels: The Great Inquisition of 1245–1246 (Princeton, 2005), 40; and Moore, “Heresy as Disease,” 10–11.
- 6.
Vitae fratrum ordinis praedicatorum: necnon Cronica ordinis ab anno MCCIII usque ad MCCLIV, ed. Benedikt Maria Reichert (Leuven, 1896), 307–08.
- 7.
See Emir O. Filipović, “Converting Heretics into Crusaders on the Fringes of Latin Christendom: Shifting Crusade Paradigms in Medieval Bosnia,” in The Defence of the Faith Crusading on the Frontiers of Latin Christendom in the Late Middle Ages, ed. Paul Srodecki and Norbert Kersken (Turnhout, 2024). I am very grateful to Dr Filipović for sharing this chapter with me in advance of its publication and for advice on terminology in south-eastern European languages.
- 8.
For Anglophone studies, see especially Rebecca Rist, The Papacy and Crusading in Europe, 1198–1245 (London, 2009), 130–32; eadem, “Pope Gregory IX and the Grant of Indulgences for Military Campaigns in Europe in the 1230s: A Study in Papal Rhetoric,” Crusades 10 (2011): 79–102; Francesco Dall’Aglio, “Crusading in a Nearer East: The Balkan Politics of Honorius III and Gregory IX (1221–1241),” in La Papauté et les croisades / The Papacy and the Crusades, ed. Michel Balard (Aldershot, 2011), 173–84; Gábor Barabás, “Heretics, Pirates, and Legates. The Bosnian Heresy, the Hungarian Kingdom, and the Popes in the Early Thirteenth Century,” Specimina Nova Pars Prima Sectio Medievalis 9 (2017): 35–58; Filipović, “Converting Heretics into Crusaders.”
- 9.
Rist notes that papal letters are not the best sources of information for the specific belief systems of discrete “heretical” sects. See Rebecca Rist, “‘Lupi rapaces in ovium vestimentis’: Heretics and Heresy in Papal Correspondence,” in Cathars in Question, ed. Antonio Sennis (Woodbridge, 2016), 229–30.
- 10.
On the Bosnian Church, see John V. A. Fine, The Bosnian Church: Its Place in State and Society from the Thirteenth to the Fifteenth Century. A New Interpretation, rev. ed. (London, 2007).
- 11.
VMH, 1:31.
- 12.
Rist, The Papacy and Crusading, 137.
- 13.
Mark Gregory Pegg, “The Cathars and the Albigensian Crusade,” in Shipping, Trade, and Crusade in the Medieval Mediterranean: Studies in Honour of John Pryor, ed. Ruthy Gertwagen and Elizabeth Jeffreys (Aldershot, 2012), 344.
- 14.
Fine, The Bosnian Church, 126.
- 15.
See the chapters by Nikolaos Chrissis and Francesco Dall’Aglio in this volume. See also Nikolaos G. Chrissis, Crusading in Frankish Greece: A Study of Byzantine–Western Relations and Attitudes (Turnhout, 2012), 83–133; Francesco Dall’Aglio, “The Opposition Between Bulgaria and the Latin Empire of Constantinople: A Necessary Hostility?,” in Medieval Bosnia and South-East European Relations Political, Religious, and Cultural Life at the Adriatic Crossroads, ed. Dženan Dautović, Emir O. Filipovic, and Neven Isailovic (Amsterdam, 2019), 65–84.
- 16.
See Nada Klaić, Politički položaj bosanskih vladara do Tvrtkove krunidbe (1377. g.) [The Political Position of Bosnian Rulers Before the Coronation of Tvrtko (1377)] (Zagreb, 1994), 89–94; 94–119.
- 17.
On Hungary’s role in the crusade, see Barabás, “Heretics, Pirates, and Legates.”
- 18.
Timothy May, The Mongol Conquests in World History (London, 2012), 37–58, esp. 47–48.
- 19.
Malcolm Lambert, The Cathars (Oxford, 1998), 301.
- 20.
On “Balkanism,” see Maria Todorova, Imagining the Balkans (Oxford, 1997).
- 21.
Patrick J. Geary and Gábor Klaniczay, eds., Manufacturing Middle Ages: Entangled History of Medievalism in Nineteenth-Century Europe (Leiden, 2013), esp. 1–9. See also Kathleen Davis and Michael Puett, “Periodization and ‘The Medieval Globe’: A Conversation,” The Medieval Globe 2 (2016): 1–14.
- 22.
On Schmidt’s legacy, see Bernard Hamilton, “The Legacy of Charles Schmidt to the Study of Christian Dualism,” Journal of Medieval History 24 (1998): 191–214.
- 23.
Charles Schmidt, Histoire et doctrine de la secte des cathares ou albigeois, 2 vols. (Paris, 1849), 1:ix. On Schmidt’s purpose in writing, see Lucy J. Sackville, “The Textbook Heretic: Moneta of Cremona’s Cathars,” in Cathars in Question, ed. Sennis, 208–28, at 208–210. For Schmidt and Kulturprotestantismus, see Mark Gregory Pegg, “The Paradigm of Catharism; or, the Historians’ Illusion,” in Cathars in Question, ed. Sennis, 21–52, at 31–33.
- 24.
Schmidt, Histoire, 2:57–62. On the Orientalist bias in early histories of dualism and its legacy, see Pegg, “The Paradigm of Catharism,” esp. 1–25 and 31–32. On the relationship between Orientalism and “Balkanism,” see Maria Todorova, “Introduction: Balkanism and Orientalism. Are they Different Categories?,” in eadem, Imagining the Balkans, 3–20.
- 25.
Schmidt, Histoire, 1:104.
- 26.
Ibid., 1:138.
- 27.
Ibid.
- 28.
For one deconstruction of this myth, see Yuri Stoyanov, The Other God: Dualist Religions from Antiquity to the Cathar Heresy (New Haven, 2000), 250–56.
- 29.
Franjo Rački, Bogomili i patareni [Bogomils and Patarenes] (Belgrade, 1931), originally published in serialized form in Rad JAZU 7, 8, and 10 (1869–1870). My citations refer to the 1931 text.
- 30.
Rački, Bogomili i patareni, 481.
- 31.
Arthur J. Evans, Through Bosnia and the Herzegovina on Foot during the Insurrection, August and September 1875, 2nd ed. (London, 1877). It is worth noting that this was long before Evans enjoyed renown as an academic archaeologist; as he tells it himself, he travelled to Bosnia as a private citizen “owing to a special curiosity to see a race of Sclavonic Mahometans”: ibid., v. Although it was read as such following its publication—and is worth addressing because of its influence—Evans does not present it as a formal academic study.
- 32.
Evans, Through Bosnia and the Herzegovina, xxiii–xliv.
- 33.
Ibid., lv.
- 34.
Ibid. Evans’s text would be used by the Austro-Hungarian regime as the historical underpinning for a new national identity that was to be bestowed on Bosnia by the new regime, one which would supersede Bosnia’s shared history with its neighbouring Serbia—not part of the Empire—and instead couple it with Bulgaria. See Marian Wenzel, “Bosnian History and Austro-Hungarian Policy: The Zemaljski Muzej, Sarajevo, and the Bogomil Romance,” Museum Management and Curatorship 12 (1993): 127–42.
- 35.
Fine, The Bosnian Church, 111–24. For the early historiography of the relationship between the Bosnian Church and dualism since Rački, see Jaroslav Šidak, “Današnje stanje pitanja ‘Crkve Bosanske’ u historijskoj nauci” [The Current State of the Issue of the “Church of Bosnia” in Historical Research], Historijski Zbornik 7 (1954): 129–42; and Jaroslav Šidak, “Problem heretičke ‘Crkve Bosanske’ u najnovijoj historiografiji (1962–75)” [The Problem of the Heretical “Church of Bosnia” in Recent Historiography (1962–1975)], Historijski Zbornik 27–28 (1974–1975): 139–82.
- 36.
On this problem in a broader context, see Christine Caldwell Ames, “Medieval Religious, Religions, Religion,” History Compass 10 (2012): 334–52.
- 37.
Fine, The Bosnian Church, esp. 28–29.
- 38.
Ibid., 126.
- 39.
Lambert, The Cathars; Bernard Hamilton, “Cathar Links with the Balkans and Byzantium,” in Cathars in Question, ed. Sennis, 131–50. The influence of Steven Runciman’s The Medieval Manichee: A Study of the Christian Dualist Heresy (Cambridge, 1947), 94–115, and Franjo Šanjek’s Les Chrétiens bosniaques et le mouvement cathare, XIIe-XVe siècles (Paris-Louvain, 1976), on Western-European scholarship, both of which adhere to the dualist narrative, perhaps also accounts for why Fine’s work was not as influential initially as it might have been.
- 40.
For example, Lambert, The Cathars, 299. On the problems of separating out what we might characterise traditionally as acts of persecution from pastoral care or “mission,” see Christine Caldwell Ames, “Does Inquisition Belong to Religious History?,” The American Historical Review 110 (2005): 11–37, and Amanda Power, “Going among the Infidels: The Mendicant Orders and Louis IX’s First Mediterranean Campaign,” Mediterranean Historical Review 25 (2010): 187–202.
- 41.
Aloysius L. Tăutu, ed., Acta Honorii III et Gregorii IX (Vatican City, 1950), 233 (cited hereafter as AHG). English translation based on Janet Hamilton, Bernard Hamilton, and Yuri Stoyanov, eds., Christian Dualist Heresies in the Byzantine World, c. 650–c. 1450: Selected Sources (Manchester, 1998), 265.
- 42.
AHG, 233. On Gregory’s use of disease metaphors, see Rist, The Papacy and Crusading, 142–43.
- 43.
John H. Arnold, Inquisition and Power: Catharism and the Confessing Subject in Medieval Languedoc (Philadelphia, 2001), 28–29.
- 44.
Christine Caldwell Ames, Righteous Persecution: Inquisition, Dominicans, and Christianity in the Middle Ages (Philadelphia, 2009), 147–152.
- 45.
Ibid.
- 46.
Pegg, A Most Holy War, 78.
- 47.
AHG, 268.
- 48.
AHG, 269; PL, 215:1024–25.
- 49.
Christopher T. Maier, Preaching the Crusades: Mendicant Friars and the Cross in the Thirteenth Century (Cambridge, 1994), 33, 58–59. Rist, The Papacy and Crusading, 138.
- 50.
AHG, 269.
- 51.
Fine alludes to this numerous times in The Bosnian Church, see esp. 27–46.
- 52.
Lambert, The Cathars, 298.
- 53.
Filipović, “Converting Heretics into Crusaders.”
- 54.
VMH, 1:122: “Universis Christi fidelibus per Carneolam, Istriam, Dalmatiam, Bosnam, Cruaciam, Serviam et alias partes Sclavonie constitutis.”
- 55.
VMH, 1:123.
- 56.
VMH, 1:130.
- 57.
Raymond d’Aguilers, Le “Liber” de Raymond d’Aguilers, ed. John Hugh and Laurita Lyttleton Hill (Paris, 1969), 36. See also Thomas Whitney Lecaque, “The Count of Saint-Gilles and the Saints of the Apocalypse: Occitanian Piety and Culture in the Time of the First Crusade” (unpublished PhD thesis, University of Tennessee—Knoxville, 2015), 178.
- 58.
Robert Bartlett, Gerald of Wales, 1146–1223 (Oxford, 1982), 178–221; Chronicles and Memorials of Great Britain and Ireland During the Middle Ages, ed. James F. Dimock, Giraldi Cambrensis Opera 5 (London, 1867), 26.
- 59.
Pegg, A Most Holy War, 12–15.
- 60.
Honorius III, “Mirabiles elationis maris” (15 February 1225), in Honorii III romani pontificis opera omnia quae extant, ed. Charles A. Horoy, 5 vols. (Paris, 1879–1882), 4:782.
- 61.
AHG, 271.
- 62.
AHG, 272.
- 63.
VMH, 1:147.
- 64.
VMH, 1:122–23.
- 65.
VMH, 1:122–23.
- 66.
VMH, 1:130.
- 67.
VMH, 1:128–29.
- 68.
VMH, 1:129–30.
- 69.
VMH, 1:129.
- 70.
VMH, 1:162.
- 71.
VMH, 1:168.
- 72.
VMH, 1:168.
- 73.
VMH, 1:169.
- 74.
VMH, 1:169.
- 75.
VMH, 1:169.
- 76.
VMH, 1:169–70.
- 77.
VMH, 1:170.
- 78.
For an overview of these crusades, see Filipović, “Converting Heretics into Crusaders.”
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Day, K. (2024). Crusading Against Bosnian Christians, c.1234–1241. In: Carr, M., Chrissis, N.G., Raccagni, G. (eds) Crusading Against Christians in the Middle Ages. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-47339-5_8
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